Sausages fly, time bends and logic screams for mercy in “The Old Woman.”

Steeped in the works of Russian absurdist author Daniil Kharms, this 90-minute avant-garde fantasia springs forth from the singular mind of director Robert Wilson. Adapted by Darryl Pinckney and starring ballet star Mikhail Baryshnikov and actor Willem Dafoe, it is a dizzying collage of poetry and movement that caroms from the arresting to the maddening with relentless intensity.

A triumph of the weird, this latest experimental piece from the legendary director of “Einstein on the Beach ” and “The Black Rider” makes its regional premiere through Nov. 23 at UC Berkeley, presented by Cal Performances. Wearing whiteface and eerie cowlick hairdos, the two stars embrace Wilson’s rigorous formalism with wit and grace. The demented duo nimbly skips from the vaudevillian to the tragic and back, with bits of cartoonish shtick tossed into the mix when you least expect it.

In this black comedy, the narrator is a writer who finds the corpse of an old woman in his apartment. He stashes the body in a suitcase, which he may or may not lose. Oh, and he might be a chemist.

It’s never clear what is real and what is nonsense in this bizarre realm, just as it’s not easy figuring out who is playing what. One guess is that Baryshnikov and Dafoe are two halves of the writer’s warring brain, another is that they are angels of death fluttering near the kill.

In by far the most haunting passage, which is repeated until you know it by heart, these two demonic emcees swing through a lavender sky as they describe the sensations of starving to death.

“This is how hunger begins/The morning you wake, feeling lively/Then begins the weakness/Then begins the boredom/Then comes the loss/Of the power of quick reason/Then comes the calmness/And then begins the horror.”

That fragmentary refrain, told in a seemingly endless loop, is all the more terrifying because that is precisely how Kharms later died, starved by his captors in a Soviet gulag.

Unfortunately, not all of the piece is that visceral. There are many static stretches that test the viewer’s patience for the eccentricities of the theater of the absurd.

Still, Dafoe, who previously worked with Wilson on “The Life and Death of Marina Abramovic,” seems born to this nightmarish world. His creepy rasping voice and sinister smile heighten the feeling of menace.

Baryshnikov brings his trademark elegance and fluidity to this odd affair. His dancer’s grace fits perfectly with the heightened physicality of the piece as a demented pas de deux. His meowing, for instance, is quite unsettling. (The dancer and the director are next planning to collaborate on a piece about famed Russian dancer Vaslav Nijinsky.)

Windows fall from the sky, furniture floats and clocks tick backward in one beautiful but also frustrating tableau after another. The piece is visually dazzling (lighting is one of Wilson’s most potent techniques), orchestrated with meticulous precision but that doesn’t stop it from driving you to distraction with its nonsensical barrage of squeaks, growls and coos.

“Woman” is as confounding as it is visionary, which is likely just as Wilson intended.